I'm David Leheart of New York Times Opinion. Last summer, one of my colleagues became a little obsessed with one problem in particular, flash flooding. Climate change is increasing the number of floods, just as President Trump is cutting government programs that help communities deal with those floods.

The story begins in Riverdale, Iowa. It's home to just 550 people. Mayor Huddleston had help from the federal government. The feds ran a gauge on Duck Creek, a little brick house with a sensor inside. It measured the height of the creek and posted the information online. Local officials would use that information to make decisions about evacuations during storms. But the mayor no longer had that crucial service at his disposal.

He went to check the height of the creek online and said, "This gauge has been discontinued. Please email Gary Johnson if you'd like to ask any questions." I typed an email. Hey Gary, what's going on with this gauge? And I immediately got a response back and it said, "Hey, this is Gary Johnson. I've taken the deferred resignation program and I'm not available to help you." Deferred resignation is what the Trump administration offered tens of thousands of federal employees last year. It allowed them to stop working but continue getting paid for a few months while they looked for a new job. He discovered that the feds had ripped the whole thing out and it would have eventually cost the town more than $100,000 to replace it.

But the mayor was very lucky because Iowa is different. Engineers at the Iowa Flood Center have developed an incredible tool. Larry Weber is the director there. He showed me the gauge in his lab. I would say that this is at the size of a big shoe box. Pretty straightforward really.

Cities and towns can buy the gauge from the flood center. Local officials like Anthony can attach it to the side of a bridge over a body of water and the sensor inside measures the height of that water. It then posts that information online with a predictive model so local officials can see how, say, a rainstorm is likely to affect their creek. The data from the federal gauge is part of a national weather forecasting system. The Iowa gauge is not, but otherwise it does pretty much what the federal one can do for way less money. The Iowa made gauge cost about $7,500.

The predictor model attached to the gauge said that given the rain, Duck Creek was likely to rise 8 ft sometime in the middle of the night. Mayor Huddleston thought of one resident in particular, an older man who lives right next to the creek who uses an oxygen tank. And if the creek hit 8 ft in the middle of the night, that is a tough time to evacuate.

It's Friday night. They're not a 24/7 operation, right? And so there's nobody there to answer the phone. "It's so heavy... I was furious that evening that I couldn't get a hold of people that they were gone." Thanks to the magic of LinkedIn, Anthony tracked down an engineer at the flood center named Felipe. He agreed to run a different model to see if he could get a more precise answer. At around 11:30 p.m., Felipe calls me back and he says, "Hey, it's only going to be 4 ft. I did the math. The model's overpredicting a little bit."

If Mayor Hedleston hadn't been able to reach the flood center, he might have had to evacuate the neighborhood in the middle of the night for no reason. That risks a real loss of trust in local government. Those officials want to get evacuations right to preserve their relationship with their residents.

The gauges are connected to an online mapping system they use all the time. Here's Rick Wolfkull from Buchanan County: "We just had a proposal from a developer to put a 30-home subdivision right in the floodway. I said, 'You realize this area has been underwater every time a frog farts.'" This mapping system lets officials game out where to build and whether to risk lives to rescue stranded residents. "We run our model. We give water velocities in all the streets and say you're better to go down Third Avenue."

City officials elsewhere have to rely on data from the National Weather Service and FEMA maps, which are notoriously limited. The interface looks like it's from internet 1.0. The FEMA maps don't account for intense bursts of rain that lead to flash flooding. Larry said the average state could do it for about $2 million to start and then about half a million a year to maintain it. That is a small fraction of the tens of billions of dollars most states spend. As federal officials continue to disappear, Iowa has a plan, a blueprint for other states to follow.